There’s always plenty to be said in favour of taking a distinctly unusual premise and building an unconventional film around it, which challenges conventions about storytelling and character. On occasion, such an approach has resulted in truly striking, in some instances genuinely groundbreaking cinema. However, it can also result in works that simply feel tedious, […]
You know how everyone has got a ‘must’ list? Must-watch horror movies, must-play video games, must-cook food of ancient Atlantis? Well, 100 Bullets is the epitome of must-read comics, side-by-side with such greats as Watchmen and The Sandman. A brilliant noir crime work written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Eduardo Risso, 100 Bullets starts […]
I think everyone must remember the first time they saw Dead Alive – or, to give it its UK title, Braindead, where it released in the spring of the same year (May). There are other titles in use, all of which show that distribution companies took the film very much in the spirit it was […]
A teenage girl, angry at her father for wanting to remarry, invites her schoolfriends to spend the summer break with her at her maternal aunt’s house in the countryside. Once there, the girls realise not all is right with the house, and they need all their wits about them to escape the terrible place. A […]
My relationship with the Hellraiser sequels is ambivalent at best, hostile at worst; as I’ve said previously, the first Hellraiser is rather important to me, and I’ve always yearned for a fully-realised entrant into the mythos to appear, but with the exception of Hellbound – itself a brilliant horror movie – I’ve always ended up […]
The Company of Wolves (1984) really is a force of nature – a vivid array of stories-within-stories which capture the insurrectionist tendencies of Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of familiar fairy stories reworked into unfamiliar forms. The film brings several of Carter’s tales to the screen, albeit via a new, modern framing […]
With the Paranormal Activity series still fairly fresh in the memory, and the ongoing box office success of the Insidious and The Conjuring franchises, the ghost movie has seemingly never been more popular – and arguably never in greater need of a shot in the arm. We all know the routine: dark rooms, lengthy silences, […]
To say that this film arrives with a weight of expectation on its shoulders is putting it mildly. For starters, The Shape of Water is the latest film from Guillermo del Toro, widely regarded one of the greatest, most singular cinematic visionaries of our time, not to mention one of my own personal favourite filmmakers […]
A lot of brilliant animators and creators have emerged from the Studio Ghibli workshop, but very few have attempted to capture the magic of Ghibli or make it their own as much as producer Yoshiaki Nishimura. Founder of Studio Ponoc, a contemporary to Studio Ghibli, Nishimura took several members from the Ghibli arthouse and launched […]
How short can you – legitimately – make a cinematic scare? There are people who would say that a second is enough, but these people are probably discussing jump-cuts. Jump-cuts aren’t scary; jump-cuts are the equivalent of someone screaming BOO! into your ear to trigger a reflex reaction. Most people need – and expect – […]
Anthony Bourdain is the coolest guy on the planet. He travels, he eats, and he tells Andrew Zimmern to shut up. He looks like what a good brandy tastes like. He’s what I imagine that bad-ass guy from the neighborhood grew up to be instead of peaking in high school and having a kid way […]